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High-power BLDC motor driver

A high-power BLDC motor driver for industrial electric vehicles, delivering 20 kW continuous power from a 180 × 130 mm board, in a design the client fully owns.

Client
Industrial electric vehicle manufacturer
Scope
Hardware, bring-up firmware and bootloaders
Timeline
1 year
Delivered
Board design, bootloaders and manufacturing package

The challenge

A motor driver the client could fully own

The client builds industrial electric vehicles and runs its own complex motor-control algorithms. An off-the-shelf driver would have left the hardware a black box, so they wanted a design they own completely and can tune and extend themselves.

The driver had to deliver 20 kW continuously and 40 kW peak from a 100 V system, fit a 180 × 130 mm footprint, and protect itself and the vehicle against overvoltage, overcurrent and shoot-through.

What we built

A 20 kW power stage and an STM32 controller, in two boards

Hardware

Power and control boards

A power stage and a separate STM32 control board, stacked into one 180 × 130 mm unit.

  • 20 kW nominal, 40 kW peak at 100 V
  • Isolated gate drivers
  • Hardware overvoltage, overcurrent and shoot-through protection
  • Isolated digital inputs and 2 A digital outputs
  • Ethernet, CAN, RS-232 and RS-485
  • Incremental and BiSS encoder support

Firmware

Bring-up firmware and bootloaders

Firmware that tests every interface on the board and lets the controller be updated over Ethernet or CAN.

  • Bring-up tests for every interface
  • Ethernet bootloader
  • CAN bootloader
  • A clean base for the client's own control algorithms

Delivery

Ready to manufacture

A tested design and everything needed to build it, refined over two hardware iterations.

  • Schematic and PCB layout
  • Prototype testing and validation
  • Manufacturing files
  • Support through the handover to production

Result

From prototype to production

  • In production, after two hardware iterations.
  • Full design ownership, so the client develops its control algorithms on hardware it controls.
  • One year from the start of the project to production.

Your project

Have something similar in mind?

Tell us what you are building and we will come back with questions and next steps.